


do you know (what do you know?)

by ncfan



Series: Femslash February [29]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Femslash February, Femslash February 2019, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 10:38:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17806448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Once, there was a woman who was an eye. Once, she knew a woman who was a fish.





	do you know (what do you know?)

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was an eye. She didn’t really grasp yet that she was an eye, and certainly had no idea of what it meant that she was an eye. She watched the world around her, half-cognizant of the glistening threads that bound everything around her into connection to each other, half-cognizant of what was shifting and squirming beneath the surface of the so-called normal world.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was almost an eye, and did not want to be. She’d been raised to be an eye, raised to be a servant to the great Eye that watched all that was and all that would be, but this woman had no desire to be a servant to anything. She wanted to make her own way through the world, be a power in her own right, even if she could never quite match the might of those things that lurked beyond the edges of our understanding. If she had her way, she would be air, free of all chains and beholden to no one.

They crossed paths in the hall one day. The one was small and serious and unassuming, the other also small, and bright-eyed and wearing a smile that the woman who was an eye did not need to know she was an eye to recognize as an expression of pure hunger.

“Do you enjoy your work here?” the woman who was an eye asked of her.

The woman who would be air laughed, a bright, hollow sound that spoke of corpses hollowed out time and by maggots. “Oh, it’s terribly boring. Your treasure hoard wouldn’t attract even the weakest of dragons.”

Well, that was a source of some confusion. A frown crossed the face of the woman who was an eye, as she looked over the woman who would be air. She didn’t know her very well, and as she looked at her, she got a flash of… something. There was an itching behind her eyes, like there was something she ought to know, and shouldn’t. Looking at the woman who would be air was like looking at a glacier lit up by the sun: dazzling and deathly cold.

“If it is so terribly boring, why would you stay here?”

Another bright and hollow laugh answered her. “Oh, I’m not going to be here for much longer, don’t you worry. Once I’m done with this place, I’ll leave it far behind, for I have much further to go.” Her smile widened as she stared intently into the face of the woman who was an eye. “So do you, if you’ll let yourself, though I think my path will be the more rewarding.”

The woman who would be air brushed past in a cloud of wormwood and smoke that lingered long in the other’s nose. No matter how she tried, the woman who was an eye could not make sense of what she had been told, and could not pry the truth from the other. After a while, she wasn’t certain she wished to know, even as the desire to know grew from an ember to a flame.

-0-0-0-

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was an eye. She did not want to be an eye. What she wanted more than anything was to be a woman who was a woman, a woman who was nothing but a normal human being, but this was a world where you rarely got what you wanted, especially once you had been touched by dark powers and thrown into their world. She was learning things about the world she inhabited, the world she _truly_ inhabited. She was angry and terrified—and committed.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was a fish. She had been raised to be an eye, but it was not what she wanted, to be shackled to any one power that ruled unseen over the world. She wanted nothing more and nothing less than to be free, to be a power of her own among the monsters that roamed the shadowed places of the earth. But it is not such an easy thing, to constantly mingle with the unseen powers that rule over the world and not become bound to them. She was constantly struggling against the tide, constantly in danger of plunging beneath the waves and drowning. She was a woman who was a fish.

Though she no longer had any real right to be there, the woman who was a fish was a regular presence in the domain of the woman who was an eye. It was a pleasure to visit an old haunt with the knowledge that she was one of the few who had ever managed to escape unscathed, and there were certain connections that she had seen fit to maintain, though her motives might be inscrutable.

“Tea?”

“Oh, no, you remember how much I hate tea.”

A sigh and a slightly sharp “… _Fine_. Would you prefer coffee?”

A laugh, hollower than it was bright. “Only if it’s not the burnt swill I found in the kitchen.”

“What were you even doing in our… I have my own coffee maker. I trust my normal brew will be to your satisfaction?”

“Of course.”

The woman who was an eye watched the woman who was a fish out of the corner of her eye as she hovered over the coffee maker. There was gray in her fair hair now, just there was gray in her own dark hair, but even as age began to make its mark on her, she seemed younger than she had when they had first met. Then again, the woman with an eye thought to herself, as she poured two cups of coffee and returned to her desk, she felt no older, though time and age were pressing their ravages into her skin. She was an eye, and not a human, and she did not feel age as humans did.

(She would have given the world to feel age as humans did.)

Steam drifted up from the two chipped porcelain cups in helix spirals, undulating lazily and filling the air with a cloying humidity. Though she had insisted on being let in to this office, the woman who was a fish was in no hurry to explain why she was here, instead filling the room with the smell of rubbing alcohol and asphodel. She stirred her cup with a spoon, smiling to herself as she stared into its depths.

This was not the first time she had arrived unannounced, and when she left, things tended to be missing. Meanwhile, she’d visited many times more than that, but never in person. She was a suggestion at the margins of the stories fed to the woman who was an eye, a shadow of fear and longing that drew the eye like a guttering candle flame. The woman who was an eye wanted her to slink back to the shadowed places she ruled over, mean as they were, at the same time that she wanted to unveil her eye and strip every protective layer from the mind of the woman sitting opposite her, drinking her knowledge until both were weak with exhaustion.

“How do you find your work these days?” asked the woman who was a fish, smiling into her coffee cup without ever taking a sip.

“Well enough.”

“Is it satisfying?” Eyes dark as a starless night met eyes gray as a morning sky in winter; smile met frown. “Do you find a deeper purpose in it?”

“It is satisfying enough.” And since she still had yet to fathom what the woman who was a fish intended to abscond with upon leaving, she’d give her no further satisfaction than she already intended to extract. “Personally, I find it rather dull at most times. Just a great deal of filing and recording. It’s gotten to where I have to start to suck on lozenges, my throat gets so sore.”

The woman who was a fish laughed, laughed as though this was the funniest thing in the world. “Oh, really?” Her dark eyes shone with mirth sharp enough to cut. “Oh, well, I suppose it may have been too much to hope that you would find a deeper meaning in all of this.” She stood abruptly, abandoning her coffee cup with nary a qualm. “Well, if you ever do find some deeper satisfaction in this, let me know. I would be fascinated to hear what you make of it.”

She would take something. She surely would, as she always had before. When the woman who was an eye began looking over her domain, she found that the woman who was a fish had taken a man.

This would have its consequences.

-0-0-0-

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was an eye. She wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about it, but it had its uses. She preferred that people not know she was an eye, preferred that they not know that _she_ knew she was an eye. Normal people would have been terrified, and not told her what she wanted to know. People like her would have seen her as a threat, and while she was not without power, she was often alone, and preferred subterfuge and careful traps to outright battle.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was almost death. She did not perceive the boundaries of her cage, and turned a blind eye to the chains that bound her.

When the woman who was an eye was very old and felt it not at all, a young man gave her a book made of skin. She tried not to see his mother in him, and succeeded just enough to send him away before she flipped to the last soft, floppy pages stitched to the back. She could see beyond the shadow of his mother just enough to tell him that he didn’t want to see, and there was something distant in her that tasted like relief, when she found that he was not so enthralled to the great Eye as to insist on seeing it anyways.

The book was larger than she had thought it would be.

She read and read until her voice was sore, and she did not stop until the air was filled with the smell of wet earth and molding dust, and the woman who was almost death stood before her, her chains visible to everyone but herself.

Dark eyes narrowed rather than widened; the bow-shaped mouth, delicate curvature preserved even in old age and in death pursed in a considering frown. “Well. This is a surprise. I didn’t think you had it in you to make such connections.”

They were not young girls to fall to taunting one another, and the woman who was an eye gave a curt nod instead. “You should have done a better job of fostering your son’s loyalty.” She stared intently at her fellow. “I’m not here for a friendly chat.”

The woman who was almost death did not seem as bothered by that as she should, though she did not smile. “No, you were never one for chatting. You were always so terse when I tried to chat, especially as time wore on.”

“Huh. Is that such a surprise?”

“Hmm, no.” The clock in the corner was ticking the time, sharper and crisper than the woman who was an eye remembered from her youth. Before her, there and yet not-there, smelling of grave dirt and rotting leaves, the woman who was almost death looked at her levelly, sober as she had never been in life. “How long?”

And the woman who was an eye could take little satisfaction to say, “The whole time, almost.” She raised an eyebrow. “Subtlety was never your strong suit.”

“No,” she admitted easily, “but was I ever made for subtlety?”

“…No.”

The audience had been ushered from the theater, and all the props had been put away, save what sat, misshapen and soft, between them—and oh, the woman who was an eye, for all that she had experienced, had never expected to find the interstice between life and death a thing so easily conquered. It was just the actors now, and in the dark when all the spotlights had been turned off, you could see more clearly than anywhere else in the world.

“I suppose you have come to kill me.” Fingernails went to picking at inked skin. “Does my silly boy know you intend to do away with his mother?”

“He virtually begged me to free him from you.”

“ _There’s_ family feeling for you.”

Fire would destroy pages in the book, or so experience spoke of books belonging to the End. It would take longer than it did certain others, and the pages might resist stubbornly, but they would succumb to the flames in the end. There was little that could be done to stop it, and the fact that the condemned didn’t try to flee with the book suggested that she knew, or at least suspected, her power unequal to that of her executioner.

They stood, separated by the interstice, and stared, neither making a move.

Finally, the silence found itself broken: “You had questions. I have questions, too.”

The woman who was an eye spoke, and spoke, and the more she spoke, the more her condemned smiled, the more her eyes lit up, the more she wore a look of absolute hunger.

When the woman who was an eye was silent again, the silence was immediately filled with peals of cruel, delighted laughter. “For you, Gertrude? Oh, for you, of course.”


End file.
